Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) can help you save money in taxes and give more to charity. I spoke with Alex Neckles from ImpactAssets and Lori Choi from Veris Wealth Partners to help explain what these vehicles are and how to use them to activate more dollars to support your impact goals.
Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) can help you save money in taxes and give more to charity. I spoke with Alex Neckles from ImpactAssets and Lori Choi from Veris Wealth Partners to help explain what these vehicles are and how to use them to activate more dollars to support your impact goals.
Linda Rogers: [00:00:00] My name is Linda Rogers, and this is Investing Forward.
Linda Rogers: [00:00:19] 30% of annual giving occurs in December, with 10% occurring on the last 3 days of the year. That's a 2018 statistic from nonprofitsource.com. So whether it's due to the holidays or trying to record a tax deduction by the end of the year, clearly many people are starting to think about charitable gifts right now. So I thought this would be a great time to discuss donor advised funds or DAFs. DAFs are accounts administered by a charity with the purpose of managing charitable donations on behalf of an account holder. Now, when you give to charity, if you're like most people, you give cash. You write a check to the charity or enter your credit card info onto the charity's website. It could be much more beneficial for you to instead open up DAF. You can fund the DAF with cash or assets. Because you are legally giving up ownership of what is put into the account, you receive a tax deduction in the year of the contribution. While the contribution is irrevocable, you maintain the right to advise on how the money in the account is invested and where it gets granted. In this podcast, we're going to go into more detail on the logistics of how this works and specific situations where a DAF could benefit you. To help me, I'll be joined by Alex Neckles from ImpactAssets. ImpactAssets is a 501c3 that administers DAFs for investors. They can, however, offer much more than your typical DAF provider. While they allow you to invest your staff into traditional investments, their menu of impact investments is extremely impressive. You can invest in Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT, which was on our last podcast episode, Mission Driven Finance, and Impact Investing Firm in San Diego and other investments that you may be interested in but unable to access due to high minimums. Afterwards, stay tuned for my interview with Lori Choi from Veris Wealth Partners. She's recommended DAFs to her clients in the past and shares when they can be really beneficial. She was also able to provide a couple of interesting examples of private investments that her clients invested in with the help of the ImpactAssets team. So let's get started with Alex Neckles from ImpactAssets.
Alex Neckles: [00:02:35] So hi there. My name is Alex Neckles. I'm with ImpactAssets and I am the regional director for business development. And I work on the team helping bring in not only clients and advisors that are interested in using their donor advised fund for impact investing, but also working with impact organizations interested in figuring out how they could bring potentially impact investing into their work as well to help support their causes.
Linda Rogers: [00:03:03] Ok, and can you tell us more about ImpactAssets and how they came about?
Alex Neckles: [00:03:08] Yes, absolutely. So ImpactAssets came out of an organization called Calvert Impact Capital - used to be called Calvert Foundation. And so, originally the idea was it was started by the original founder of Calvert Investments, Wayne Silby, he was on the board of directors. And it was essentially a progression where originally Wayne said, OK, let's think about socially responsible investing. Let's have mutual funds that screen out bad things. Then the next progression was, well, let's have the mutual funds that invest in positive things. And then from there he said, well, let's do Calvert Foundation now Calvert Impact Capital and let's do direct investments into companies that have a positive impact. And at that point, the next step was, well, donor advised funds and philanthropic dollars. People have causes they care about. But by and large, the there were two separate parts of the house. There was the philanthropic side and then there was the investing side. So and the two did not really talk. And so the idea was, well, what would it look like to make sure that not only are the grants having a positive impact, but we're going to help the investments have a positive impact as well from donor advised funds. And that is how the donor in fund got started originally at Calvert Impact Capital. As that program grew, the end of it was the idea was to say, let's have ImpactAssets, be a separate organization so it could continue to grow. And really over time, we have evolved from maybe being more of, you know, ESG and SRI mutual funds having the impact to people, I would say are now at the point looking to us to do direct private debt and equity investments out of their portfolio, their philanthropic portfolio. So when I joined about 10 years ago, we were at around $40M. We are now at around $1.2B. And that growth has really come from clients saying, you know, the 5% or whatever portion it is that I grant out is having a positive impact. What about the other 95%?
Linda Rogers: [00:05:29] And how do you explain donor advised fund to an investor that perhaps is not familiar with the term?
Alex Neckles: [00:05:36] The easiest way to think about it is we essentially manage 1,200 private foundations. Now, it's very important to say that that it is not a private foundation, but we are a 501c3 nonprofit where any time somebody can open an account, let's just say, for example, the Linda Fund, you would make a donation to ImpactAssets. You would be able to open an account, the Linda Fund, you know, let's just say for $5,000 you get a tax deduction as soon as you give the money to ImpactAssets and the money legally becomes ours at ImpactAssets. But you are able to advise us on not only how that money is granted out, but also how it's invested. And so, you know, the growth of donor advised funds has been dramatic. They have grown, I would say, in a way that not many people would fully be aware. And by that I mean the largest charity in the United States right now is Fidelity.
Linda Rogers: [00:06:46] Alex is referring to Fidelity Charitable, which is the largest DAF in the country. Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab - all of these investment firms have separate charitable arms that administer DAFs. For investors, Fidelity Charitable is a 501c3, just like ImpactAssets, and in 2019 they delivered over seven billion dollars in donor recommended grants to charity.
Alex Neckles: [00:07:11] And one of the reasons why they've become so popular is really that I think people appreciate the ability to give to charity, but then also retain some control on both how those assets are granted and invested. And so, you know, at some point the money will never end up back in the client's bank account. But I think people like that additional flexibility of being able to choose over time where those assets can be directed to.
Linda Rogers: [00:07:39] One situation where I would recommend a DAF to a client as when they have concentrated low base stock in a taxable account. So in that situation, they never should be donating cash to charity, which so many of them do. They should instead be giving the low basis stock to charity. The reason is that when we sell stock in our taxable account, we have to pay tax on the gain. So the market value minus the basis. If the charity sells the low basis stock, they don't pay tax on the gain because they are a 501c3. So you can instead put the low stock in your DAF, take the tax deduction equal to the fair market value and the charity can sell it for you.
Alex Neckles: [00:08:28] What you are helping your client do is not only support the causes they care about, but do it in the most effective way. Because, for example, to your point, if they were to go ahead and sell a stock and give cash to the organization, that, you know, there's an example that we give where it might mean that if they were to sell one hundred thousand dollars worth of low base of stock, they might have at the end of the day, seventy seven thousand dollars available to give to charity, whereas and if they had given it directly to the donor advised fund, that would not only mean that they would be paying less taxes, but the part that I really love is that they have more money available to give to the charity that would be one hundred thousand dollars. So they've automatically increased their ability to contribute to charity and it's more dollars that can go to the charities. So, you know, I think it's a crucial part of financial planning because imagine if you just said, hey, what if I told you that you could increase the amount that you could give to charity just by giving a different asset. And that's something where most people are still giving cash and they need their financial adviser to look at their entire portfolio and say, here's where it makes the most sense for you to give.
Linda Rogers: [00:09:45] Well, donor advised funds are available at investment firms such as Schwab and Vanguard and even community foundations. So what is unique about ImpactAssets' donor advised fund?
Alex Neckles: [00:09:59] Sure. You know, I would say that they're kind of like when you go to a car dealership, there is a different car that's going to make sense for every type of individual. And in the same way, donor advised funds have a lot of different structures. ImpactAssets is a national organization, so we don't have that same local sense of exactly what's going on in San Diego as the San Diego Community Foundation or any community foundation might. Or if you are maybe interested in saying, I don't necessarily care where the assets are being invested, I just want to pay the least amount of money in fees because I can and I want to send out grant checks. Great. There are other organizations that might be a better fit. Where ImpactAssets really comes in and where I think we shine is if people are saying in the example that I give for the dollars that are not being granted out, what's going on there? So, for example, if you care about the environment and you're granting to those causes every year and it's anywhere in the range of five to 50 percent of your donor advised fund. Shouldn't you have the assets that are not being granted out also helping the environment? I mean, that sounds in the ideal world that makes sense. And so people that come to us are really excited to have not. And this has become more popular right now, and I think rightfully so, the half my DAF movement. So people are saying, shouldn't more philanthropic dollars be having a positive impact? To that, I would say absolutely. I think it should go further than half my DAF, though. So I should I would say that in a perfect world, we don't want half your DAF having a positive impact. We want you to say my whole DAF should be having a positive impact because we believe strongly that impact investing can have just as much, if not more positive impact than a pure grant dollar. And that's why people that come to us are excited about thinking what it would look like to get more of those investment dollars activated towards supporting their impact goals.
Linda Rogers: [00:12:13] Yeah, and just to go into that a little bit, if you could put $5,000 into a DAF and turn around and give that $5,000 to charity right away if you wanted to, that's an option. Typically, though, investors fund the DAF in chunks such as when they have high income earning years so they can most benefit from the tax deduction. So when they contribute more than they're giving away, they have the opportunity to invest that difference. They can invest that money in traditional index funds. But it's also such a great opportunity to go beyond that and explore impact investing to maximize their impact for the environment, diversity or other causes that are important to them.
Alex Neckles: [00:12:52] Absolutely. Absolutely. So there are some people that would say just put me in some Vanguard index funds. What we would say is we have everything from socially screen mutual funds to a direct investment in an early stage impact investing organization. So it's the whole gamut of investable opportunities that could be used in the donor advised fund.
Linda Rogers: [00:13:15] Ok, and you answered one of my other questions because I wasn't sure you're so well known for these being able to do private, custom investments. I wasn't sure if investors also had access to just a public mutual fund. So it sounds like they do.
Alex Neckles: [00:13:31] Yeah. And that's really we have twelve hundred clients around in that vicinity. And I would say that for each client, they have a different idea of what their portfolio would look like. You could do everything from we have it's called our liquid impact portfolio, where it's almost like a cash like instrument, but it's still having impact because it's invested into the community development financial institutions and the CDs that they offer. So that has impact, even if it has cash like both returns, but also a conservative return risk profile. We have other clients that essentially view their donor advised fund as an investment portfolio, direct investment portfolio, so they might have 20 direct investments in private debt or equity funds or companies. So it really is the full gamut.
Linda Rogers: [00:14:29] And can you share what the minimum is to open a donor advised fund to ImpactAssets and also what the fees are?
Alex Neckles: [00:14:37] Sure, yeah. So we start at five thousand dollars is the minimum to open an account for those. We have five thousand dollar accounts. We have accounts that are nine figures. So there definitely is a wide variety there. The way that we work our fees is that it's a tiered fee schedule. So we charge on any assets in the donor advised fund. So it starts at one percent for the first hundred thousand and goes down from there. We also if somebody wanted to do a direct investment, so that would be anything in a private debt and equity impact fund or directly into a company, we have additional investment fees if you wanted to do those direct investments, there would be a charge for each of those investments as well.
Linda Rogers: [00:15:22] And I'm on the newsletter for ImpactAssets and I remember seeing something about Beyond Meat and how it was in an ImpactAssets donor advised fund portfolio. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Alex Neckles: [00:15:37] Happy to. Yeah, that's that's a great story. One of our clients that let's us talk about it is Seth Goldman. He was the founder of Honest Tea. And so when that company sold to Coca-Cola, he had his liquidity event and opened his donor advised fund. And he really is excited about using the investments in his donor advised fund to also invest in other companies that are creating a healthy food system. So he and a couple of our other clients invested in Beyond Meat when it was still a private company. So he invested in their private equity. The company continued to grow, and when they went public, our donor advised fund had its own liquidity event because we within his account that then went public. And so the size of his account increased significantly. And one of the things that we love about that is that not only did their donor advised fund increase in size significantly, but now that money can be is all going to have a positive impact. So he has used those proceeds to now invest in other impact companies or grant to other causes that he cares about. To answer your question about the diligence. For these types of programs, we call them our custom investments. So these are when our clients come to us and they say, I would like to make this direct investment into this company. Here are the terms. I've done my own diligence and I feel comfortable making this. So they make a recommendation to us and say, I would like you to review this investment and make it. We have a fantastic custom investments team that then takes that recommendation. And it's a really easy process for our clients. They go online and fill out a form. If it takes more than five minutes, that means the internet must have been slow. But they make that recommendation and we take it from there and we reach out to the investee and we do everything from depending on the stage and the size of the company. It could be if there's less than three years of operating history, we do a background check on the management. We take a look at the financials, the we check to make sure that there is impact cooked into the DNA of the organization. So we try and avoid making investments into companies that are just doing corporate social responsibility. We want to invest into organizations that really have a positive impact just by virtue of what they're doing. And if everything goes well, we try and get those investments done generally within a two week period. If they're larger, sometimes that there's a little bit more diligence that goes in there. But the focus is that from the time that you make an investment recommendation, we get all the documents that we need, our customer investment team turns that around and we could get deals done relatively quickly. At this point, doing about one of those deals a day for our clients. We have 835 of those investments that have been made. And so that went from when I first joined. We I was handed basically a stack of manila envelopes and they said, here's our customer investments. Can you keep an eye on these? So maybe about 20 deals to doing a deal a day and anywhere from twenty five thousand dollars to multimillions.
Linda Rogers: [00:19:06] So that is actually different than I thought. I did not realize the investor can bring the direct investment idea to you. ImpactAssets does their due diligence and approves it. So how would it work then if I know what I want but I don't have an investment in mind. For example, if I'm interested in investing in a private company that focuses on climate change, would you have a list of approved investment options that I could choose from?
Alex Neckles: [00:19:32] Sure. So we have the ability. We have our private debt and equity impact funds, and that's a rotating list of funds that we make available to our clients. One of the things that I love as well is that our our team has always thought creatively on how do we democratize impact investing and just make it a little bit easier. So we have these funds that are available and it's everything across all thematic classes - debt, equity, you know, we really try and make it a broad array. It's usually between 8a to 12 funds that are available at a time. And what we do is we we're not we are not an RIA. So we are not telling our clients we made a portfolio for you, but we've done our diligence and we're making them available to our clients. So a recent example that is going to be going live is Water Equity. That is the investment arm of Water.org, which is an organization that Matt Damon is connected to. You might have heard about it. What clients are able to do there is generally they have pretty significant minimums, but ImpactAssets. If you're thinking about how we are a nonprofit that takes assets from all of our clients, that means we also have the ability to aggregate recommendations from multiple clients. So the Linda Fund, you say, I really am excited about this Water Equity investment that I see here. Let me do $10,000 into water equity. That's the minimum investment that you can make from the donor advised fund into those funds. Generally, these funds have anywhere from $250,000 minimums to a $1M minimum. But we're able to take $10,000 from each client because what we do is we take all of those recommendations, aggregate them, and then Water Equity would have one investor that that might be, let's call a $1M across all of our different clients. So to that point, that's us giving our clients access to deals and it's also making a much lower minimum. So that's a program we're really excited about. And I would say a great entry point into impact investing if you're not necessarily connected to a bunch of deal flow into impact investment.
Linda Rogers: [00:21:47] And that is why I wanted to have you on. I mean, I have clients interested in private impact investments, but it doesn't make sense yet in their investment portfolio. Either, the minimum would be too high, that it would be too concentrated of a holding or the risk return profile doesn't make sense for them right now. On the other hand, when you look at their DAF, that money is already off their balance sheet in a way and earmarked for charity. So that could be the place to consider some of the investments you just mentioned that they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
Alex Neckles: [00:22:17] If we're looking at the adoption curve of impact investing, I would say, are at the point where there are individuals that definitely, like a Seth Goldman, know exactly the type of deals they want to do. They have those relationships. But if, as we have seen this industry grow where people are saying, I want my investments to be aligned with my values, we're going to need to make it easier for people to get access to these different types of investments. And one of the things that I think can really help is if somebody is saying, OK, well, how do I do that? It can be a nice place to start with your philanthropic dollars because of the ability, like we're talking about, to aggregate investments, get exposure to deals that they might not have otherwise, maybe even they might be a little leery of impact investing. And so it helps to start with these types of dollars. And, you know, the point I make is that not all impact investing should be done with philanthropic dollars by any means. But I truly believe that if you do have philanthropic dollars, they should all be done to be invested for positive impact. The fact that you have gotten that write off, you've seen so much right now, people saying, you know, we have all these philanthropic dollars in these foundations and community foundations. What are they doing to support covid response or racial justice inequity? And I would you know, I agree with all of that. If we're not looking at, you know, the dollars that are not being granted out, we're really missing an opportunity to have as much impact as possible. So, you know, if it is just the place where people could start their impact investing journey, well, I think it's a great touch point.
Linda Rogers: [00:24:08] Ok, well, this has been super helpful. What is the best way for people to stay in touch with you? I know you are very responsive over at LinkedIn, but do people can people reach out to you directly or do they have to work with an adviser?
Alex Neckles: [00:24:23] No, and and anybody can reach out to our website, impactassets.org, or our team is engagement@impactassets.org. Reach out honestly any way that is going to work best for you, either directly, working with your advisor, come one and come all, because we'll figure out how to take care of you.
Linda Rogers: [00:24:45] Excellent. Thank you for doing this.
Alex Neckles: [00:24:48] Oh, this was great. Thank you so much.
Linda Rogers: [00:24:50] Next up, Lori Choi from Veris Wealth Partners.
Lori Choi: [00:24:55] Great. Thank you so much for having me on this podcast today. So, again, my name is Lori Choi and I'm a partner and senior wealth manager at Veris Wealth Partners, which is an independent impact wealth management firm serving clients nationally. We work with high net worth individuals, families and their foundations, looking to align their portfolios with their values. And more personally, I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, went to undergraduate at Wharton School in Philadelphia, and a few years after graduating, I found myself drawn to the world of wealth management as I discovered it was the relational side of finance I hadn't seen before in undergrad and soon became a CFA charter holder and have been a wealth manager for over 12 years now. And I joined my current from Veris in 2010. And so I've been with them for over 10 years and joined as the partner in 2015. As a side note, I'm also a co-founder of a group called WISE or Women Investing for a Sustainable Economy, which is a community for people who identify as women to connect, grow and share with the purpose of advancing sustainable investing and women's leadership. And I was just saying, I lived in the New York area for 12 years, but just recently moved to Austin, Texas, and excited to work with clients from here.
Linda Rogers: [00:26:12] Great. And can you share a little bit about your typical client?
Lori Choi: [00:26:17] Yeah, so, you know, our firm is been you know, we're focused on, we have a vision to create a just and sustainable world at the highest level. And so as we think about the clients that want to we want to serve and that want to work with us, it's really the kind of client that is concerned about the current state of inequality and risks to humanity around climate change and very personally committed to living in a way that promotes their social justice and environmental sustainability values. From a practical standpoint, you know, they end up being, you know, in the range of two to twenty five million dollars and kind of one of those either a family or foundation, typically with a few institutional clients. And they also tend to be very philanthropic, which is, you know, I think fitting for the conversation today around donor advised funds.
Linda Rogers: [00:27:07] Great. And I wasn't sure. Do you also offer comprehensive financial planning or is it just investment management?
Lori Choi: [00:27:14] Yeah, we do offer financial planning, estate planning coordination, definitely the investments as well, portfolio construction and yeah, just try to partner with them along their learning journey as well. I know. Just kind of, you know, getting financial support is one thing and then getting a whole understanding of the impact investing world is another. And so we kind of work with them and talk to them about the different tools in the toolkit around how you can have impact across asset classes and A lot of times also with family foundations kind of work with their boards and maybe next generation family members to kind of bring them along and engage them in the conversation too.
Linda Rogers: [00:27:53] Can you share a little bit about how you integrate impact investing into your investment process and how that's evolved over time?
Lori Choi: [00:28:02] Sure, yeah, I mean, thankfully, our 5 founders, actually, they're so interesting, they each came from various backgrounds as social activists, as entrepreneurs, as wealth managers, and they'd really been pioneers in this industry for the last 25 years and only came together in 2007 to kind of bring a more custom and sophisticated offering to families and foundations. Some of them had been working at brokerages before that, etc. And so really since the founding of Veris, we've been fully committed to this idea of of 100% impact being, you know, getting your whole whole portfolio activated for impact. And when we talk about having impact across all asset classes, we we also talk about it in terms of kind of key thematic areas that we have been honing and understanding a little bit more over the years. And those themes are the climate change and the environment, gender lens investing or kind of investing in women and girls, community wealth building and social equality and sustainable agriculture and food systems. Those are kind of key 4 thematic areas. And then within each asset class, there are different tools, as you know, to have an impact. So whether that's public equities, you know, we invest in managers and funds that integrate environmental, social and governance or ESG factors. We really love those strategies that employ shareholder engagement strategies and proxy voting. On the public, fixed-income side, you know, looking at social purpose municipal bonds to invest in communities or affordable housing related mortgage bonds. And on the alternative side, definitely our clients are very interested and get engaged as we talk about having a more direct, you know, proactive impact approach, whether that's around sustainable forestry, sustainable regenerative agriculture, renewable energy, project finance, et cetera. They really get excited about those. And lastly, I saw that you actually did a blog on this around community development financial institutions - just love that. They they we we totally love them as well. And just the ability to support local communities around affordable housing, education or health care, whatever it may be, just a great way to have an impact with not much risk.
Linda Rogers: [00:30:15] Well, in terms of strategies for your clients, do you ever recommend donor advised funds for them? Who would be a good candidate for that?
Lori Choi: [00:30:24] Yeah, absolutely. So definitely for clients who expressed interest in charitable giving and and even with new clients where we we're just in the process of exploring options, we always encourage them to consider opening up or funding their DAFs, especially during years of significant income or capital gains. And you guys had a great discussion around how when those times giving appreciated stock. You know, we definitely love to do that as well. And we've also found a lot of really great use cases for the donor advised funds when we customize them. So for certain donor advised funds, we're able to kind of custom manage it as if we were the advisor on the portfolio and in some cases make recommendations to to direct them in specific ways to custom investments that, you know, they wouldn't normally maybe feel inclined to invest in because of the risk tolerance or the the risk profile of the investment. But in their donor advised fund, we're sort of very happy to make those types of high impact investments.
Linda Rogers: [00:31:23] Yeah, that's a good point. And has you ever heard of ImpactAssets before?
Lori Choi: [00:31:27] Yeah, absolutely. We love them. They're definitely one of our firms. Go to DAF option recommendations, though. We work with many DAFs based on our clients preferences. ImpactAssets are definitely among the top choices and, you know, just love, like how we can know our clients can go onto the platform if they don't have a high minimum account, they can kind of go in and select from a menu of options. And then for the custom portfolios that we manage, we can do really unique impact investments. And there are a couple examples that I thought would be interesting to share. One was like a custom loan to an organization in Rwanda which was providing healing and reconciliation services post genocide, being able to do that, even an international loan, which I thought was really amazing, and then more kind of locally US based private equity, direct investment into a company that's building community the movements around social and environmental justice. So definitely can be tailored to the client's passion.
Linda Rogers: [00:32:27] I definitely did not realize the amount of custom investments that they did and the team that they have that's doing all the due diligence. Yeah, really kind of blew me away when he was mentioning that.
Lori Choi: [00:32:40] Absolutely right. And they are great and they have the whole team that can do the due diligence they work alongside to get kind of ongoing reporting also from the organization. And so they are truly kind of keeping an eye on the shop for sure, but also kind of making the process very smooth on the client side so that, you know, as we're working to invest the overall portfolio that we where we're partnering with ImpactAssets and that process. And, you know, they're they're yeah. They're just great.
Linda Rogers: [00:33:12] Excellent. Well, do you have some time just to share more about WISE, the group that you co-founded?
Lori Choi: [00:33:18] Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, it started in 2012 with my two co-founders. And really, as a way for us to build our own networks and get personal and professional support on this journey. You know, at the time, it felt like a very niche career area industry within finance. And we thought, gosh, if we're doing this and we're excited about it, there must be other women doing this, but we need to find them. And so we just set out you know, I remember it was a dinner we had in New York City, we invited a dozen women to come in and join us for dinner and had this conversation. And we're like, are you interested in kind of meeting regularly to talk about this exciting new field we're all a part of and supporting each other along the way? And people agreed and we started meeting in each other's living rooms from then on every month. And it's been since 2012 and we're now 2,000 plus members and across eight different chapters globally. And just it's been a huge source of support for me. And I know a lot of others in the community just being able to share, you know, really kind of industry related topics as well as more lifestyle, sustainable personal topics, whether that's, you know, a sustainable fashion. We've had conversations about that or yoga sessions together and, you know, mommy play dates and things like that over the years. So just been a really great community.
Linda Rogers: [00:34:40] How do you see the group evolving with covid? And you've moved you're not in New York City anymore? I know when I had looked at it, it seemed like the events were in New York City in person. So, yeah. How do you see that changing?
Lori Choi: [00:34:54] Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. Right. We were so yeah, we loved the in-person format for so many years and actually recently have created more of what we're calling a virtual chapter. But essentially we're really now merging content across our regional chapters and starting to create more open content. And while we still have chapter leaders who are amazingly committed and wonderful leaders, we're we're now kind of opening that up. And so I think it's interesting how that the WISE community is evolving now to be more global and virtual as well.
Linda Rogers: [00:35:32] Can you share the name of the website just to learn more?
Lori Choi: [00:35:35] So, yeah, that's wisecommunity.org?
Linda Rogers: [00:35:39] Thanks for doing this. What's the best way for people to stay in touch with you?
Lori Choi: [00:35:44] Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn. You can email me or reach out to me, message me there. You can also subscribe to Veris' Impact newsletter if you want to stay in touch. Also that's veriswp.com And you can just scroll to the bottom and subscribe. And again, for the WISE website, you can check out wisecommunity.org?
Linda Rogers: [00:36:05] Thanks, Lori.
Lori Choi: [00:36:07] Thank you so much.
Linda Rogers: [00:36:09] I happened to just see that there's an interesting case right now where a couple is suing Fidelity Charitable. They contribute low basis stock to their DAF at Fidelity right before the end of the year in 2017. The problem was that when Fidelity sold the stock, nearly 10% of the company, they did it all at once and flooded the market. The stock price went from nearly $32 to $19 dollars and hasn't recovered. It's currently at $3 dollars as of October 28th. The investors in this case are saying that Fidelity Charitable said they would sell the stock in 2018 and take their advice as to when to sell. That's not what happened. So the story is perhaps just a good way to remember that once the money goes into the DAF, it is not legally yours. Fidelity Charitable, ImpactAssets and the DAF providers are allowed to listen to your recommendations, but they don't have to. That's why you can receive the tax deduction in the year of the contribution. So I'll be following that case, but hopefully this episode has encouraged you to be more strategic with your charitable contributions this year. And maybe it's given you an idea for yet another way that you can integrate impact investing into your portfolio. So if DAFs have peaked your interest, talk to your advisor, contact ImpactAssets directly or go to InvestingForwardPodcast.com to learn more about Alex, Lori, and view today's episode transcript. See you next time.
Linda Rogers: [00:37:42] My name is Linda Rogers. You were listening to Investing Forward. If you liked what you heard, leave us a rating, subscribe and stay tuned for next time.
Linda Rogers: [00:39:01] Linda Rogers is the owner of Planning Within Reach, a registered investment advisor. Planning Within Reach produces the podcast and makes it available on its website and through other distribution channels. Linda Rogers and any guest on the podcast are providing their own views and opinions and are not necessarily the views and opinions of Planning Within Reach. Nothing on the podcast should be construed as a solicitation or offer or recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investment advisory services are only provided to investors who become Planning Within Reach clients pursuant to a written investment management agreement. Clients of Planning Within Reach may hold positions in securities discussed in this podcast. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. All investments involve risk and may lose money. The Investing Forward Podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied on for any investment decisions. Consult with a financial advisor, accountant, attorney, or conduct your own due diligence.